The urban legend has it that if you say, “Candyman” five times while looking in the mirror, that you will summon a man with a hook for a hand to come and kill you. Now, I never saw the original Candyman movie from 1992, but just hearing a legend like that has me responding like …
We meet an attractive man and woman (Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) on an awkward Tinder date at a diner. The date is not going well, but it’s just about to get a whole lot worse. On the drive home, they are pulled over for what seems to be a routine traffic stop. Did I …
In the opening moments of Waves, the camera spins euphorically as it follows a day in the life of 18-year-old Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). He goes to school, he works out, he hangs with his friends, and—most memorably in the opening shot—drives down the sunny Florida highway with his girlfriend hanging out of the car …
In the trailer for Harriet, there is a tease of a visually arresting climactic scene showing abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo) cocking a rifle and firmly ordering, “Ready?” to the Union soldiers she is commandeering. On signal, hundreds of slaves flee from the woods toward them on the river, toward the ironclad warships that will …
I won’t be the first to tell you that director Kathryn Bigelow knows her way around filming extremely intense sequences. From her praised war films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, she now turns her lens on a homeland war. An infamous incident during the race riots in Detroit in 1967 takes center stage …
Henrietta Lacks, though anonymous until recently, was a very real woman. An African-American mother to a brood of five, she developed cancer and died in 1951. However, when she was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, cells from her cancerous tumor were biopsied and found to have the amazing ability to reproduce by themselves… forever. …
Denzel Washington takes the directorial reigns in the big screen adaptation of playwright August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of an African-American couple in 1950s Pittsburgh. Denzel knows this story, and knows how to stock the film with top-notch actors. After all, both he and Viola Davis won Tony awards in the Broadway revival, so it …
Taking place in a rough, drug-addled neighborhood in Miami, Moonlight introduces us to a character in three chapters. “Little” (Alex Hibbert) is a cripplingly shy kid who is relentlessly bullied at school, who can’t even find solace at home where he lives with his crack-addled mother (Naomie Harris). A surprising friend comes in the form …
“My grandparents were colored. My parents were Negroes. And me, I’m black.” So says the amiable host and creator of Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has the demeanor of a friendly math teacher, and is a patient, open conversationalist. As a black man who was a teen in …
If you are lucky, you have frequented an establishment that felt like a second home. Whether it is the place where you get coffee, or your church, or your barbershop, you know when you walk in the door you’ll be greeted by familiar faces that know you by name. Now, I’ve never seen any of …